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Technology and Epistemology: Information Policy and Desire

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Technology and Epistemology: Information Policy and Desire 9 Technology and Epistemology Information Policy and Desire Sandra Braman The science of science and technology policy is a relatively new funding area for governments. The research agenda is multiply reflexive, asking, 'What knowledge can we produce about the decisions we make about how to produce knowledge?' Directing public funds to support such work is a matter of information policy-laws, regulations and doctrinal positions dealing with information creation, processing, flows and use. Funding pro­ grams in this area mark the horizon of epistemological desire for the state, a desire that is Lacanian in nature, enduring and unquenchable. Since the late 17th century, that desire has been channelled through facticity, a cultural formation oriented around the fact, whether towards or away. Where facticity is important, there are specific social functions for narrative forms that present themselves as factual. Societies dependent upon facticity generate and adhere to detailed and verifiable procedures for the development, presentation, evaluation and use of facts. Institutional authorities certify specific types of information as factual and information production processes as fact producing. Facticity became dominant as a cultural formation after John Locke introduced the concept of the fact in 1690. For Locke, facts appear when a perceptual entity has an experience of the material or social environment, symbolically expresses what has been learned about the environment, and those referential expressions become the subject of discussions through which agreement is reached on what will collectively be accepted as the truth. The impact of Locke's conceptualisation of the fact was enormous and immediate. His Essay on Human Understanding was the most influential book of the 18th century aside from the Bible (MacLean 1936), and the work is considered to have established the foundations of modern epis­ temology (Foley 1999). Lockean fact catalysed the resolution of distinct genres such as novels, journalism and history out of the previously undif­ ferentiated matrix of narrative forms (Davis 1983). Tom Wolfe (1973) describes the impact as equivalent to that of the introduction of electric­ ity-a parallel that is far from trivial, for the early Industrial Revolution influenced cultural receptivity to facticity by providing evidence of its concrete rewards. 134 Sandra Braman Facticity has thus long been intertwined with technological innovation. For Canadian communication theorist George Grant, technology is episte­ mology, not just extending human abilities but offering a new approach to knowing and making in which both activities are changed (Barney 2000). Economists who rely upon evolutionary theories of innovation also see technology as epistemological in nature since technological change affects what it is that we know, and new inventions-the technological equivalent of biological speciation-allow us to know new things (Mokyr 1990).1 From this perspective, information policy can be understood as episte­ mology policy. This chapter provides a first pass at examining the impact of recent technological innovations on epistemology policy by working through each element of Lockean fact as a distinct policy order that builds upon that which is prior, adding new degrees of freedom in an ourobouros in which the fourth order (discussion) returns us to the first (perception) in today's technological environment. The chapter opens by briefly examin­ ing relationships between facticity and the law and information policy as epistemology policy before turning to the specific policy issues that arise as a result of technological innovation at each order. FACTICITY AND THE LAW Lennard Davis provides a fascinating account of the role of the law in cre­ ating facticity as a social formation with political valence beginning in the 17th century. This period was marked by the tensions that accompanied the shift from religious to secular political power, the politicisation of narra­ tive, and seemingly endless civil wars. He notes, The ideologizing of language ... created the conditions for legal inter­ vention into the realm of the discourse to diffuse the politicizing of news/novels, which then created the conditions for a definition of fact and fiction in which the former could be repressed and the latter more or less ignored. (Davis 1983: 83) Davis discusses the ways in which specific legal tools shaped the nature of facticity, including libel law; stamp and tax laws; the criminalisation of the production of certain types of narrative and of the lifestyles associated with narrative production; and the licensing, registration and regulation of the means of production of mass communication of the era-printing presses. Other types of law were essential to facticity during that period as well. The earliest materials to be copyrighted, for example, were factual in nature-maps, calendars, law books and arithmetic and grammar prim­ ers (Ginsburg 1990). Over time, the range of laws and regulations that affect the nature of facticity has expanded; facticity is often involved when regulatory agencies move into previously unregulated domains of activity Technology and Epistemology 135 as when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) turned its attention to consumer fraud (Biegel 2001). One of the functions of the law is to 'fix' facts. For a long time, legal pro­ cedures and rules of evidence have been among the certified procedures for the development and use of facts. More recently-at least in the US-courts have become judges of quality of scientific evidence, as the extensive litera­ ture on the effects of the US Supreme Court decision in Daubert details. The law provides authoritative meaning in the face of ambiguity (Catlaw 2006), 'rationality rituals' for the evaluation of risk (Mercer 2008), and decisions as to when scientific controversies have been resolved (Ingram­ Waters 2009). Patents fix the boundaries of otherwise mutable objects (Marques 2005). Regulatory agencies institutionalist the mathematical ratios to be used for accounting purposes (Hopwood and Miller 1994). The law affects facticity as a cultural formation even when the subjects of legally mandated information collection and distribution are inherently unknowable (as can be the case for the intelligence establishment (Berkow­ itz and Goodman 2000). And it can establish uncertainty itself as a legally acceptable foundation for decision-making (as has happened with stock offerings in the US [Fortun 2001]). Insights from many different disciplines help us understand just how legal interventions affect the nature of facticity and, thus, epistemology. Innis's research on the economic effects of communication media (1951), Leith's (1983) analysis of the history of the standardisation of the English language, Sigal's (1973) history of journalism in the US, Venclova's (1983) review of the history of Soviet government constraints on the production of texts, Power and Laughlin's (1996) use of Habermas's theory of law to investigate the nature of facticity in accounting, and Lash's (2007) analysis of relationships between particular configurations of facticity and political hegemony all make the historical point as manifested in quite diverse cir­ cumstances. MacKenzie's (2007) analysis of the interactions between legal and technological innovations that generated confidence in the claimed fac­ ticity of derivatives demonstrates the value of this perspective for under­ standing the 21st century financial crisis. Building on the work of John Dewey, political scientists link the knowledge dimensions of the law to the epistemology of democracy itself (E. Anderson 2007; Ezrahi 1995). Changes in policy-making processes, rules of evidence, constraints on the use of research results as inputs into policy-1naking, and shifts in the loca­ tion of the burden of proof are all manipulations of the epistemological conditions of legal decision-making (Gysen et al. 2006). Epistemological consequences of the effects of technological innovations on the nature of facticity run in both directions. As Nowotny-a histo­ rian of the sociology of knowledge-argues, the development of contempo­ rary social science practices between the two 20th century world wars was driven by the desire to influence policy-making and a sense of the present as 'a strategic place from which to influence the future' (Nowotny 1983: 136 Sandra Braman 189). In one among many documented concrete examples, the facticity of data about teen automobile accidents and fatalities has influenced social policy, education and governmental responses to risk (Best 2008). Matoe­ sian (1995) argues that policy analysis itself should incorporate attention to interactions between perceptions of facticity and the social construction of illegal behaviour when considering legal reforms. Legal struggles to deal with the effects of technological change in par­ ticular have epistemological consequences since technology is itself a way of knowing or, in Turkle's (2004) words, 'a carrier of a way of knowing'­ the technologies we use alter what we know, and what we know about, as well as our relationships with the material and social worlds in which we live. As Heidegger (1977) noted, all innovations have epistemological con­ sequences because each demands that we think in different ways; Postman applied that insight to one specific cultural technology when he commented that 'television is the command centre of the new epistemology' (Postman 1985: 78). There are,
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